"Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War" by Ted Morgan

Art WinslowSpecial to Tribune Newspapers

"Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War"Random House, 698 pages, $35

It is a curiosity of history that the French lost control of Dien Bien Phu, in the northwest corner of Vietnam, two years before the famous 1954 battle there that spelled the end of French colonial rule in Indochina. When they evacuated the site in 1952 in advance of the Vietminh troops of Ho Chi Minh, the French Northern Command called it a “hole-in-the-ground,” and asserted, “Dien Bien Phu is not a strategic sector.

How quickly minds changed: By November of 1953, partly to block Vietminh movement into neighboring Laos and partly in hopes that the enemy could be drawn into a large set-piece battle that would inflict heavy losses, French generals decided to drop paratroopers and Legionnaires into Dien Bien Phu to establish a new base and airstrip. In essence, the valley outpost was bait to attract opposing forces in a war that had dragged on since 1946 and had lost the support of the French public. As Bernard Fall put it in "Hell in a Very Small Place," his classic, blow-by-blow account of mounting miscalculations and the deadly siege of the base, when faced with a full-scale assault by Communist regular forces reinforced by additional heavy armaments, the French had but two choices: "to evacuate the valley altogether or to make it impregnable by transporting into it an adequate garrison supported by vast amounts of firepower." Any attempt to compromise between those paths, Fall noted, could prove "altogether disastrous."

Yet compromise and disaster it was, as Vietminh artillery on the surrounding hills destroyed the airstrip and drove the French forces into bunkers and trenches. A French government commission investigated the debacle in 1955 but its report was still classified when Fall wrote his book. Fortunately, that report and other material since made public, including the Pentagon Papers, inform Ted Morgan's "Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War." Where Fall's focus was relatively tight on the extended battle and the French command in Hanoi, Morgan parallels the combat with contemporaneous diplomatic efforts involving the principals plus the Big Four (the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France) and China to reach resolution of the situations in Indochina and Korea, the latter already divided under an agreement that had stopped the shooting war there. Morgan meticulously chronicles American ambivalence toward France's goals and its conduct of the war, a spectrum of views that ranged from F.D.R.'s opposition to colonialism to his successors’ fervent anti- Communism. By the time of the battle, C.I.A. pilots were ferrying war materiel to Dien Bien Phu and some in government circles were arguing for direct U.S. military intervention, even raising the prospect of using nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower dismissed the idea of sending troops unilaterally, but financial aid to France ran so high that even without boots on the ground, the United States was effectively underwriting 80% of the war.

What Morgan presents is a view of the early Cold War in high gear, featuring heavyweights from Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill to the young John F. Kennedy and Chou En-Lai (later China's premier), U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and of course the panoply of French generals and politicians whose actions and inactions sealed the fate of the roughly 13,000 soldiers sent to occupy Dien Bien Phu. Several of those figures wrote memoirs that Morgan draws from judiciously in his encompassing analysis. That, together with snippets from soldiers' letters home, helps ground this history in first-person reporting from multiple perspectives. Morgan's approach of cutting between the physical battle and the diplomatic maneuvers of the Geneva conference casts the struggle for this single outpost into the geopolitical context of its time: the waning of colonial holdings, the rise of China (which aided the Vietminh) as a world power, American fears of Communism hewing to a "domino theory" that Asian states could fall under it one by one.

Historically, the pitched phase of fighting at Dien Bien Phu ran from mid-March to early May, while the Geneva conference opened in late April and closed in late July, ending with an agreement to partition Vietnam. The French military and the Vietminh under General Vo Nguyen Giap were acutely aware that negotiations to end the war were under way as they fought, and each hoped the battle would translate into political leverage at Geneva. What American policy-makers knew is sometimes startlingly revealed in their own words, through Morgan’s liberal quotation of diplomatic cables and records of the Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations. As far back as 1950, a special assistant to Dean Rusk (then assistant secretary for the Far East at the State Department) had been sent to Vietnam to determine in what way the United States could best help France. His cable to Rusk warned, "Hatred and distrust of the French is so deep-rooted that no real basis for long-range cooperation exists or can exist on the present basis." Furthermore, American identification with France "would weaken American influence in Asia."

Then there is the non-geopolitical half of Morgan's book, sad, horrifying and graphic in its detail as corpses and the wounded pile up, and a sense of inevitability sets in. The big brass of the French military were often blinded by their own agendas and operated at cross- purposes, while men they could barely re-supply and only minimally replenish-- through self-imposed constraints and conditions on the ground-- were killed.

General Henri Navarre, the overall commander of French forces in Indochina, pointed out that he had never served in Asia and knew nothing of Indochina when he was appointed to the job in 1953. Nonetheless, he was told his mission was to find "an honorable way out." Navarre was reliant on a recalcitrant, self-promotional subordinate, General Rene Cogny, who saw Dien Bien Phu as a losing proposition. Navarre lost faith in Cogny but failed to fire him. Cogny admitted to the 1955 investigating commission that his actions "came close to lack of discipline," and Morgan handily documents "the complete disconnect between the Hanoi command and the men on the ground."

On the ground, Dien Bien Phu's polyglot forces (which included Vietnamese, Germans, Moroccans and Algerians) were headed by a tank cavalry officer, General Christian de Castries. By common report, Castries shrunk from control once the base came under fire, becoming "a hidden presence inside his bunker" while a more junior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Langlais, directed operations. (The investigating commission criticized Castries for this, calling him "mistaken in giving operational control" away, but Cogny, in his testimony, denied there was "abdication.")

By the end of the 56-day siege, the surviving troops had been living on half rations and were in such short supply that some of their machine guns were manned by amputees. Ten thousand were taken prisoner, only to end up in camps where mortality rates ran as high as 67 percent. On the verge of the surrender, Cogny told Castries by radiophone from Hanoi:

"Listen, old fellow. I realize it's all over, but avoid any form of capitulation. That is forbidden. We must have no white flags."

Former Literary Editor of The Nation, Art Winslow is a frequent contributor to the Chicago Tribune.